Palm Sunday; Matthew’s Passion Narrative; St. Paul’s, 4/9/2017

Jim Melnyk: “An Uncomfortable Story”

In a few minutes we will hear the story once again – Matthew’s take on the Passion of our Lord.  It’s not a pretty story.  There’s a certain amount of ugliness about it.  It is not a comforting story.  And although as Christians we believe it has a glorious outcome, we don’t have permission to read it all the way to the end today.  The story ends with the grave.  The story and the hymns we choose to sing today, temper the glory of the Eucharist which foreshadows next Sunday’s joy.

It’s “a strange day.”  “It has two names, two themes, [and] mixed moods.” (Don Armentrout, Synthesis)  It’s been known as both Passion Sunday and Palm Sunday.  But I’m thinking perhaps a better name for this day might be Paradox Sunday because of the extreme shifts in tenor and tempo.  This Paradox Sunday underscores the contradictory realities of the Christian faith and the Kingdom of God – a kingdom “in which the least are the greatest, weakness is strength, and death brings life to all” (Paula Gooder, Sojourners On Line).  Paradox Sunday serves as an entry way into Holy Week – a week where, as theologian Jürgen Moltmann once proclaimed, “God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh” with God (Synthesis).

The paradoxical nature of the day is heightened by the two parades we bear witness to in our liturgy.  The first parade begins for us with the blessing of palms and the proclamations of “hosanna” – which means “save us.”  We recall Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem through streets crowded with those who proclaim Jesus as the “One who comes in the name of the Lord.”  The gospel which we’re about to hear reminds us of a second parade – one that will take place before the week is out.  We call it “The Passion of our Lord,” or, “The Way of the Cross.” It is a death march to a lonely hill outside the city of Jerusalem – a place where under darkened skies Jesus will breathe his last.  In truth it is paradox – it is irony – it is scandalous – that the Messiah of God would die in such a cruel and torturous way.

Even the opening parade is paradoxical.  We call it Jesus’ “Triumphal Entry” into Jerusalem, and many Christians proclaim it as a fulfillment of an ancient prediction; but that causes us to lose the symbolic power of the event.  Theologian Marcus Borg challenges us to see this parade in a different light.  Rather than the triumphal fulfillment of an ancient prediction, Borg says “it was what scholars of the Jewish Bible call a ‘prophetic act,’” much like when Jeremiah smashed a piece of pottery before the priests of Jerusalem to show Israel how the city would be broken and the people taken into exile. (Marcus Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, Harper San Francisco, 2006, p231).

           

The so-called Triumphal Entry was actually a prophetic act by Jesus, “based on a passage from the prophets that spoke of a humble king who would enter Jerusalem on the colt of a donkey.  He would be a king of peace,” Borg tells us, “who would banish chariots, warhorses, and battle bows from the land and command peace to the nations (Zech. 9.9-10).  By riding into Jerusalem on a young donkey,” writes Borg, “Jesus enacted his message: the kingdom of God of which [Jesus] spoke was a kingdom of peace, not violence” (Borg, 231-232).

It seems to me that the paradoxical nature of Palm Sunday and Holy Week is troubling for many of us.  Jesus’ gospel message of justice, grace, and love resonates with us.  It’s the Good News we want to experience and know for ourselves and for our world, not the evil of Good Friday – because the ugliness of the crucifixion honestly chills us. 

The revolutionary, anti-imperial entry of Jesus into Jerusalem works for us as long as the demonstration doesn’t touch a part of our lives that is sacred to us.  When the revolutionary aspect of the gospel challenges how we live in this world it becomes uncomfortable – disquieting – perhaps even something to be discounted or ignored.

“What do I need to be saved from anyway?” we may ask.  “What’s so wrong with my life that I should need to be saved?  Isn’t that just the language of all those evangelical Christians who like to beat us over the head with their Bibles?”  Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why many of us gathered here this day may not make it back for the theologically and personally challenging liturgies of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.

           

Listen to the story once again with fresh ears.  Listen with fresh ears to the call for God’s kingdom – God’s community of justice, peace, and love.  Listen with fresh ears for the revolutionary challenge inherent in that call by Jesus.  Listen once again to the reality of brokenness in the human condition and how familiar and perhaps even comfortable the challenges of Herod, Caiaphas and Pilate might sound.  Do their mutterings not sound at least a bit familiar – perhaps even just a tiny bit familiar? 

Listen to the story with the knowledge that the Herods, the High Priests, and the Pilates of this world don’t have the last say.  Our brokenness, and the brokenness of this world - actions like the Palm Sunday church bombings in Egypt earlier today - don’t have the last say.  Death – even the violent death of an innocent man on a cross – doesn’t have the final say.

Walk through this hard week together as the Body of Christ gathered and called as witnesses to God’s love.  Listen with new ears – with fresh ears – as we hear the tale of betrayal and trial – as we experience a Jesus who is both agitated and grieved – who struggles deeply with what will come next.  . 

Gather at the table in the upper room as we wash one another’s feet on Thursday night, experiencing the mystery of Christ’s self-giving and our own sacramental gift of self to one another and to God as well.  Watch with Jesus as he agonizes over the coming storm.  Stand one more time at the foot of the cross and experience the paradox that in the Kingdom of God humility is greatness, weakness is strength, and most of all, that even in death we will find life.  Amen.

The Air-Stirring Spirit of God

Lent 5A; Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:1-45; St. Paul's, Smithfield, NC 4/2/2017

Jim Melnyk “The Air-Stirring Spirit of God”

A long time ago the people of Israel, lost in exile, despaired.  Their city and temple in ruins, they felt they had lost their God.  The psalmist proclaimed:

“By the waters of Babylon there we sat down and there we wept, when we remembered you, O Zion.

On the willows there we hung up our harps.

For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither and forget its skill.

Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy” (Psalm 137:1-6 NRSV and BCP combined)

             

Into the midst of this great despair a prophet arises – one called upon by God to proclaim a new hope for God’s people – forgiveness and return.  Just as God had heard Israel’s cry while they were captives in Egypt, God listens to the cry of those in exile and responds in grace, offering words of hope, and a desire for a renewed commitment of love.  And still the people struggle to believe – struggle to accept that God is not only with them in exile, but is also ready to deliver them, and bring them back home. 

“The people [are] moaning: ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off’ (Ezekiel 37:11)…. But then one day God [plops] Ezekiel down in the middle of a valley of dried-up bones. This time, [it is] God [who despairs]. God [takes] a good look at God's people and [sees] dried up hopes, dried up dreams, dried up programs, and dried up congregations. And God [says to the prophet], ‘Can these bones live?’  Ezekiel [has] the wisdom and humility to respond with a confession, ‘I don't know.  Only you know, God’" (Nancy Hastings Sehested, Sojourners Online, Preaching the Word, 4/5/2017).  And so God takes the initiative – God speaks a word of resurrection power through Ezekiel – and the bones begin to rattle and shake – they are drawn together by the Spirit of God – en-fleshed and given breath.

We come across exile of a different sort in today’s gospel lesson.  At the death of their brother Lazarus, Martha and Mary both find themselves lost in despair – their deeply felt grief leaving them feeling as desolate as the dried up bones that once confronted Ezekiel.  Many of us looked at this story the first Wednesday evening in Lent.  We wondered, “Why the four days?”  Someone quite correctly pointed out that four days made us sure that Lazarus was really dead – stone dead – dead enough to stink in the grave – as dead as the bones in Ezekiel – so dried up that not even the marrow is left!

Martha, seemingly always the member of her family quick to engage Jesus with a challenging word, complains that Jesus “could have prevented this tragedy if he had gotten his priorities straight. But [even] then she [speaks] confidently of her faith in the God who hears and answers. Jesus [tells] her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life…. Do you believe this?’ [and] Martha responds in confession, ‘Yes, Lord. You are the Christ’” (ibid).

As The Rev. Nancy Hastings Sehested puts it, “Resurrection comes to despairing, dried-up people. The only hope we have is in a God who can breathe life into our dried-up lives. Beyond our despairing no and our optimistic yes comes the bone-rattling, air-stirring Spirit of new life” (ibid).  What an incredible image – “the air-stirring Spirit of new life.”

Earlier last week we explored the Lazarus story during our Clergy Lenten Quiet Day with Bishop Anne Hodges-Copple.  Concerning the raising of Lazarus, Bishop Anne offered a question I had never before considered.  “Is there something baptismal about this?” she asked.  In Holy Baptism we proclaim that we have died to this world and are raised to new life in Christ.  Isn’t this something of what happens with Lazarus?  Isn’t this something of what happens for Martha and Mary in the deepest reaches of their grief?

Lazarus does, indeed, become a baptismal figure – buried with Christ in his tomb – all of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song….  Lazarus becomes a symbol of resurrection power as well – four days dead and in the grave; and yet by the grace and love of God in Christ he lives again – becoming what Bishop Anne called the nascent sign of the Jesus Movement.  The world changes in that moment of life-giving action – for it sets in motion the final events in the life of Jesus – moving him unwaveringly toward the cross and beyond.  Lazarus’ death and new life becomes the harbinger of Good Friday – and the promise of Easter.

And while Ezekiel’s valley of the dry bones is not meant to be baptismal in its original context, it was part of the earliest glimmerings of resurrection theology – the promise that God can and does bring new life out of death.  And as modern day Jesus followers, we can see in the exile and return of Israel reminders of baptismal life.  Israel, buried in her brokenness and exile, feels the breath of God upon her dried out bones, draws the very breath of God into her newly reformed lungs, and comes alive!

Of course the easy questions to ask might be, “When have we felt like a pile of dried up, dusty, lifeless bones?” or “When have we felt grief so deeply that, like Mary, we can hardly move, or like Martha, we want to cry out in despair?”  Perhaps the easy question might be, “When have you felt bound up like Lazarus, left in tomb-like darkness, hoping for new life?”  And those are good questions to ask – simply because most of us have experienced those realities in one way or another in our lives – perhaps even right now.

In both stories, the nightmare of the world is shaken awake by the dream of God. As theologian C. S. Lewis once wrote, “God really has dived down into the bottom of creation, and has come up bringing the whole redeemed nature on His shoulders” (C. S. Lewis, Synthesis Today, 3/18/2017).  And as much as we struggle to remain in the midst of Lent, we see constant reminders of the promise God has in store for us and for all creation – as God’s Spirit moves around us and within us, breathing new life into our lungs.

Speaking through Ezekiel God proclaims, “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.”  Martha began with the understanding that new life would come about in some glorious future Day of the Lord, only to hear from Jesus that resurrection life happens in the here and now. The Apostle Paul reminds us that the Spirit of God is a constant force living and moving within us – that, as Walter Brueggemann puts it, “Resurrection is not only an event; it is also a continual state of empowered living” (Sojourners Online, Preaching the Word, 4/2/2017). 

Perhaps, then, the best question we can ask ourselves has to do with what it means to live day-to-day lives as resurrection people.  What can it mean for us to live as if resurrection is real – unbound and unafraid?  How does that change the way we seek to live together in community – within the full wonder and diversity of the human race?  What are we willing to risk of our own lives knowing that the air-stirring Spirit of God is alive in us, and has the final say over death?  “I am the resurrection and the life,” says our Lord.  “Do we believe?”  

Artwork by John August Swanson: Take Away the Stone

Just One Question

Lent 4A; John 9:1-41; St. Paul’s, Smithfield 3/26/2017

Jim Melnyk: “Just One Question”

Listening to the radio the other day I heard an oldie from the mid-90s – whoever thought we’d call something from that time period an oldie?  Singer Joan Osborne sang the hit song, “One of Us” (Written by Eric Bazilian). I remember being intrigued by it back then, and even using it in some youth classes – even lately.  The refrain is enough to bring us up short.  “What if God was one of us?  Just a slob like one of us?  Just a stranger on the bus, tryin’ to make his way home?”  I heard the song and it made me think about today’s gospel lesson from John – because isn’t that the very essence of John’s Gospel?  “And the Word became flesh and lived among us,” the author tells us.

We are here this morning because on at least some level we believe that God has come among us as one of us – that in the mystery of the Incarnation, God has entered into the everydayness of our human lives, and knows and understands our human-ness. It also means that in some way, God has made Godself known to us in and through the person of Jesus.  As we say in today's Eucharistic Prayer: "In your infinite love you made us for yourself...[and] sent...your...Son, to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us... (BCP, 362).

Osborne’s song has a haunting reality for those of us who claim the name Christian – for those of us who are Jesus followers.  The song calls us to examine the struggles we have with our faith – what it means to be faithful in this life – in this place – day after day after day.  What if God was one of us?

To begin with, sometimes that’s just something hard to accept with the amount of anger and violence we see around us in the world every day.  Some days it just doesn’t seem to make much sense – or to have made much of a difference to humanity.  And yet, the foundation of our Christian faith is the Incarnation and the willingness of God to befriend us, and to suffer with us, in the midst of our own brokenness – and not as some kind of superhuman – not as some kind of superhero – but rather like, as Osborne puts it, the poor person we see on the street corner, or the stranger we might meet on a bus, or outside Walmart, or even our grocery store.

There are other questions in Osborne’s song – questions that seem appropriate as we read about a man born blind who suddenly receives his sight.  “If God had a name, what would it be – and would you call it to his face, if you were faced with him and all his glory, what would you ask him if you had just one question?”

Presented with the reality of a man who is blind the disciples have just one question: “Who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?”  Obviously for them, as for so many in ancient – and not so ancient – times, blindness, illness, or other forms of misfortune were understood as punishment from God.  The disciples, in asking this one particular question, seek to justify the man’s blindness.  It’s got to be somebody’s fault, they figure.  Somebody had to have messed up big time. 

The Pharisees and some of the Judeans involved in the story have a question as well.  Actually, they have several questions, all coming after the man has been healed.  Now, this healing took place on a Sabbath day, and so we know immediately that those who seek strict Sabbath observance are going to be angry.  So their questions come out of their anger at a miraculous healing being done on the Sabbath; but I suspect also out of their mistrust and possibly their fear of Jesus.  “Who is this man?” they ask, trying to debunk the reality staring them right in the face.  And to the man’s parents, “Is this your son who you say was born blind?  How then does he now see?”  They simply couldn’t see the Good News as real.

In Christ, God has broken through the barriers of isolation, fear, recrimination, and prejudice, for one of God’s people, and there is no joy – no celebration – no praise for God from anyone but the one who has just been healed. 

Everyone seems to have questions, and no one seems to want to see the answer right before their very eyes.  As singer Joan Osborne croons, “God is great!” but the disciples, the parents, and the Pharisees seem to miss the point.  And that’s where the final lines from Osborne’s song say so much for me.  “If God had a face, what would it look like?  And would you want to see, if seeing meant that you would have to believe in things like heaven, and in Jesus and the saints, and all the prophets?”  Would we want to see, if seeing meant we would have to believe – and then live as we believe – with no crossed fingers?

These particular Pharisees, not wanting to believe the power of God in Jesus, ask him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?”  The answer Jesus offers brings them up short – and it should bring us up short, each time we hear it.  “If you were blind,” says Jesus, “you would not have sin.  But now that you say, ‘we see,’ your sin remains.”  Here we have men and women who have had the chance to look God right in the face, and I have to wonder if they really want to see at all.  Do they really want to see, if seeing means they would have to believe something new and life-changing about their God, and about how God can and does act in the lives of men and women – in the lives of children and youth?  Do they really want to see, if seeing means having to let go of staunch beliefs – many of which separate them from others and from God?

Asking questions of God – and seeking to look into the face of God – is a dangerous thing, my friends!  It’s dangerous because it just might mean we have to change our minds about a few things.  It’s dangerous because we might just realize how much more compassionate and caring than us the Creator of heaven and earth is – and how much more compassionate and caring God calls us to be than we might feel comfortable being!

It might mean seeing Christ in the unkempt beggar or the iffy-looking stranger on the bus…in the batterer as well as the battered…in the high school dropout or the gang member defending his or her turf…in the migrant workers who help put food on our tables while barely living hand-to-mouth, or the refugee fleeing persecution and possible death from halfway across the globe. 

Asking questions of God, and seeking to look into the face of God, is dangerous because if we actually begin to see Christ in people we would rather avoid, we might just feel called to do something about their plight – and that would mean giving up something of who we are, and what we have.  It would mean our Christianity would have to be more than worship on Sunday mornings.  It would mean a commitment to live out our baptismal promises to proclaim Christ, and to be Christ, in and for this world.

Asking our questions and seeking the face of God can open us to the dream of God if we let it. 

And seeking the face of God might open us up to the important questions of this life and faith: “How, in this world of anger, pain, and death can we show one another the love of God in Christ?  How can we truly come to respect the dignity of every human being?  How can we better seek and serve Christ in all people, loving our neighbor as ourselves?  How can I find the grace to understand that someone else’s different faith in God is not an attack on my faith in God?”  Or perhaps we might simply ask, “God, will you help me to love?”

In response to all this – to the Gospel story and to Osborne’s song – there is a Jewish Midrash – or interpretation of scripture – many of you have heard me mention before.  The writer suggests that before every human being a legion of angels goes forth proclaiming, “Make way! Make way for the Image of God!”  Such an understanding would have allowed the disciples, the Pharisees, and the others in today’s gospel lesson to put away their suspicions, their fears, and their anger; and then allowed them to each rejoice in the wonder of God’s healing and saving love.  Their questions would have been transformed from questions of anger and suspicion to questions of awe and wonder.

How would each of our lives change, if each one of us could see, hear, and believe the cry of those legions of angels that go before each of us – the cry of those legions of angels that go before every person we meet?  Make way!  Make way for the Image of God!

One of Us

If God had a name what would it be?
And would you call it to his face?
If you were faced with Him in all His glory
What would you ask if you had just one question?

And yeah, yeah, God is great
Yeah, yeah, God is good
And yeah, yeah, yeah-yeah-yeah

What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin' to make his way home?

If God had a face what would it look like?
And would you want to see if, seeing meant
That you would have to believe in things like heaven
And in Jesus and the saints, and all the prophets?

And yeah, yeah, God is great
Yeah, yeah, God is good
And yeah, yeah, yeah-yeah-yeah

What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin' to make his way home?

Just tryin' to make his way home
Like back up to heaven all alone…

(Performed by Joan Osborne, written by Eric Bazilian)